Tag archives for spiders
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Female spiders are usually thought of as femme fatales—but male spiders of some species also eat their mates, a new study says.
Talk about a web of deceit—biologist Phil Torres has found a spider that weaves a bigger decoy “spider” to scare predators.
A New Trick Discovered in Spiders’ Webs
Posted by Alyson Foster on October 4, 2012 
If you’re like most people you probably find cobwebs to be a nuisance. But it turns out that these messy webs are actually small feats of engineering. Polymer scientists at the University of Akron have discovered that the common house spider can tailor the type of adhesive discs it uses to anchor its webs, making them stronger or weaker depending on where the cobwebs are positioned and the movements of its prey.
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As bird populations plummet worldwide, will Earth become the Planet of the Spiders? Research on Guam, a 30-mile-long U.S. island in the Pacific, found that arachnid populations increased as much as 40-fold in the wake of insect-eating birds being eaten into oblivion by invasive brown treesnakes.
Shortness of breath, excessive salivation, tremors, and an intensely painful erection are all indications of being bitten by a highly venomous arachnid commonly known as the banana spider. So toxic is Phoneutria nigriventer, a member of the Ctenidae family of wandering spiders, that its bite has been known to kill people. The spider is a…
High-Speed Spider Ambush Caught on Film
Posted by Alyson Foster on August 2, 2012 
How do you film a net-casting spider catching its prey? Strap on your hiking boots, trek out into the the middle of the woods, get your camera ready, wait a long time, and then . . . don’t blink.
Posted by Inspired by the movie The Amazing Spider-Man, Pop Omnivore wondered: What can a real spider bite do to a real human being? To find out, we asked Dana DeRoche, an arachnid specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which spider species have the worst—and weirdest—bite.
By Bob Hirshon, American Association for the Advancement of Science Saguaro National Park, Arizona–One of the coolest things about the BioBlitz, held this year in Saguaro National Park, is that it brings kids and scientists together. In this third BioBlitz “BobCast,” I go on a nighttime insect inventory, out in the desert, with entomologists and…
A new species of spider has been discovered in the dune of the Sands of Samar in the southern Arava region of Israel, scientists from from the department of biology at the University of Haifa-Oranim said this week. With a leg span of up to 5.5 inches (14 centimeters), the new spider is the largest of…
A huge number of new species of invertebrate animals have been found living in underground water, caves and micro-caverns amid the harsh conditions of the Australian outback. Insects, crustaceans, spiders, worms and many others are among 850 species found by a national team of 18 researchers, according to the University of Adelaide. A new woodlice…
A spectacular and extremely rare textile, woven from naturally golden-colored silk thread produced by more than one million spiders in Madagascar, went on display today in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “This magnificent contemporary textile, measuring 11 feet by 4 feet, took four years to make using a painstaking technique developed…
As if global warming isn’t giving us enough to worry about, now scientists say it could lead to bigger—and possibly more—spiders of at least one hairy species. Read the full story >> Photograph by Tom Uhlman/AP
The birds and the bees don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day, of course, but some certainly have bizarre mating rituals. Some of the stories National Geographic News published about this over the years included pandas watching porn, damselfly mating games that turn males gay, spiders that glow with fluorescence in the presence of potential mates, gorillas mating in the…
